Raymond Rodriguez was 10 years old in 1936 when his immigrant father walked out of the family’s farmhouse in Long Beach, Calif., and returned to Mexico, never to see his wife and children again.

The son would spend decades pondering the forces that had driven his father away, an effort that reached fruition in “Decade of Betrayal,” a social history of the 1930s focusing on an estimated 1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans unjustly deported or scared into leaving their homes in the United States by federal and local officials seeking remedies for the Great Depression.

“Americans, reeling from the economic disorientation of the depression, sought a convenient scapegoat. They found it in the Mexican community,” Mr. Rodriguez and co-author Francisco Balderrama wrote in the 1995 book, which sparked legislative hearings and formal apologies from the state of California and Los Angeles County officials.

Mr. Rodriguez, 87, who believed “the greatest tragedy of all” was public ignorance of the deportations, died June 24 at his Long Beach home. The cause was believed to be a heart attack, said his daughter, C.J. Crockett.

“It is no exaggeration to say that without the scholarly work by Ray and Francisco, no one but a handful of individuals would ever know about the illegal deportations of Mexican Americans in the 1930s,” said former California state Sen. Joseph Dunn, who sponsored 2005 legislation that apologized for the state’s part in “fundamental violations” of the deportees’ constitutional rights.

Raymond Rodriguez, left, and Francisco Balderrama co-authored a book about the raid at La Placita in 1931 that triggered the deportation of more than 1 million to Mexico, many U.S. citizens. (Photo by Wally Skalij/LA Times)

Last year the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors apologized for the county’s role in the roundups.

The deportations began a decade before the World War II internment of 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Federal and local authorities rounded up Mexican immigrants and their families at dance halls, markets, hospitals, theaters and parks, loading them onto vans and trains that dumped them on Mexican soil.

One of the most notorious raids occurred in 1931 at La Placita, a popular gathering spot for immigrants outside Olvera Street in Los Angeles. A team of Immigration and Naturalization Service agents armed with guns and batons sealed off the small public park and herded 400 terrified men and women into waiting vans. The success of the raid galvanized authorities in other localities across the country.

By 1940, Mr. Rodriguez and Balderrama found, more than 1 million people of Mexican descent had been deported. Government officials used the term “repatriation” to describe their actions, but the researchers found that 60 percent of the expelled were U.S. citizens. “They might as well have sent us to Mars,” Mr. Rodriguez once said, recalling the words of one “repatriate.”

Most of the deportees were not welcomed in Mexico. They were criticized for their American ways, for not fighting to remain in the United States, and for being a burden on Mexico’s economy.

“Ultimately, it was the children who bore the brunt of rejection and discrimination,” wrote Mr. Rodriguez and Balderrama, whose book relied on oral histories as well as archival records. “They were neither Americans nor Mexicans as defined by their respective cultures.”

The authors included in their estimate thousands of legal residents and U.S. citizens who left the United States on their own. Mr. Rodriguez considered his father one of them.

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James AveryActor James Avery, best known for playing Uncle Phil on the 1990s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” died in Los Angeles on Dec. 31. He was 65.Jason Merritt/Getty Images

His parents had immigrated around 1918 and became tenant farmers in Long Beach. “We had no money, but we had food, so we always had guests for dinner,” Mr. Rodriguez recalled in 2003 in the Sacramento Bee.

When his father announced he was leaving, his mother refused to go, saying “I have five kids born here — we’re not going to Mexico.”

The older children plowed the fields, but hard times worsened and the family depended on welfare for awhile. Mr. Rodriguez, who was born in Long Beach on March 26, 1926, dropped out of high school his senior year and joined the Navy, serving in the Pacific during the war.

Later, he went to college on the GI Bill, earning a general education degree from Long Beach City College in 1951 before entering Long Beach State, where he received a bachelor’s degree in elementary education in 1953 and a master’s degree in education administration in 1957. In 1962, he earned a master’s in U.S. history from the University of Southern California.

He taught elementary and secondary students in Long Beach for almost a dozen years, until 1969. Over the next two decades he taught history and political science at Long Beach City College and also served as its affirmative action officer and dean of personnel, retiring in 1988.

Survivors include his wife, Almira; two children, C.J. Crockett and Craig Smith; and five grandchildren.

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